Tue - January 16, 2007

On Comments


One way or another, all programmers eventually learn the importance of commenting their code. The importance of clear documentation increases with the size of the team and the complexity of the project. Ideally, the code will not only be documented but unit tested as well. Here's an example of what happens when, for one reason or another, we let ourselves be less than thorough...

Posted at 05:07 PM     Read More  

Sun - July 2, 2006

A Few Weeks with a MacBook Pro, Parallels, and MSDN Universal


Several weeks ago a maxed-out MacBook Pro arrived at my doorstep, and since then I've been putting it through the paces as a .NET development system --- using Microsoft's own Visual Studio 2005 on Windows XP, running under OS X via Parallels Desktop for Mac. To my surprise, I not only got this to work, but work well enough to blow away my 1.6 GHz Dell running XP natively with twice as much RAM...

Posted at 07:52 AM     Read More  

Sat - April 15, 2006

ListView Tooltips for SubItems


I don't say much about my .NET work here, sometimes because the nature of that work is proprietary, but usually because there's so much about .NET already on the web that it'd just be redundant. I had a hard time finding out exactly how .NET 2.0 supported tooltips for ListView subitems, though, so I thought I'd put a small blurb on the web for the benefit of others...

Posted at 10:34 AM     Read More  

Wed - April 5, 2006

My Future .NET Development Machine: A Mac!


It's official: Apple announced that they'll provide the ability for new Intel-based Macs to boot Windows XP via Boot Camp, available now as a public Beta and later as a feature bundled with OS X. While some clever people have succeeded in bringing up Windows on a Mac before, an official Apple solution will be better received, particularly among businesses that might like to give Macs a try. But the question my fellow Visual Studio users may be asking is, "Why bother?"...

Posted at 11:18 PM     Read More  

Sat - March 5, 2005

Deeper in .NET, Eventually, Probably


Some time ago I said that I'd write up my thoughts on the Wisconsin .NET Users Group's Deeper in .NET conference which was held earlier today. The only thought I can share at the moment is that it's too bad they held this on a weekend; I missed it...

Posted at 11:43 PM     Read More  

Wed - January 26, 2005

Why Unit Test?


This morning a coworker introduced a team of programmers to unit testing in C# using NUnit and NMock, and I found good opportunity to muse over some of the implications of unit testing --- why it's something we absolutely must embrace. If you'll forgive the cliché, a funny thing happened to me on the way home...

Posted at 10:08 PM     Read More  

Fri - January 7, 2005

Deeper in .NET 2005


A coworker just pointed out a few upcoming events sponsored by the Wisconsin .NET Users Group, including a Deeper in .NET 2005 event with a fairly impressive cast of speakers on March 5...

Posted at 11:10 AM     Read More  

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